I have been reading Robert’s thesis on adult learners who
choose to re-learn Math.
This actually touches the wound that I have been hiding deep
in my heart—I used to fail Add-Math during my high school study. Until now,
despite having a PhD in Education, I still cannot accept the arrangement which force
students learning both Modern Mathematics and Additional Mathematics
concurrently. To me, this is cognitively misaligned. I loved Math since I was
in primary school, and I even won the first prize in school annual Math contest
at the age of 9. All were fine until I reached the age of 17, when I had to
learn Modern Math and Add Math concurrently, taught by two different teachers.
I always scored in Modern Math, but I hardly score higher than 50 over 100 in
Add Math. Looking back this painful experience of getting demotivating results,
I believe it was the misalignment that caused the problem. Why not just speed
up the teaching of Modern Math and then continue it with Add Math? Please do
not tell me that both subjects are different. Come on, they are both
Mathematics. I agree that they are different—in the sense of difficulty level.
So it should be taught sequentially instead of concurrently.
